Belleau, Rémy (c.1528-1577). French poet. A member of the Pléiade, he was born in Nogent-le-Rotrou and educated under Muret at the Collège de Boncourt. In 1556 his translation of the Odes d'Anacréon appeared together with a collection—the Petites Inventions—which revealed an early predilection for the descriptive realism of the blason. Back in France after participating briefly in an Italian campaign in the cavalry of the marquis d'Elbeuf (1556-7), Belleau wrote a commentary for Ronsard's Second Livre des Amours (1560) and became tutor to the marquis's son, Charles de Lorraine, at the family estate at Joinville (1563-6), a setting idealized in Belleau's major work, the Bergerie (1565; revised and augmented, 1572).
Belleau's descriptive qualities are in evidence again in Les Amours et nouveaux échanges des pierres precieuses, a lapidary collection published in 1576 with verse adaptations of Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs. A posthumous collective edition of his works (1578) contained for the first time an interesting verse comedy, La Reconnue (composed about 1563).
Although Belleau's work lacks lyrical intensity and sustained imaginative vision, his sensitive evocations of the physical and natural world (including art objects) reveal the delicate precision and the pictorial realism of a visual artist.
[Malcolm Quainton]
